Elementor is a great tool for building WordPress websites. But like most complex tools, if it breaks down, it can really throw a monkey wrench into the works. Such was the case with the recent release of Elementor 3.16, 3.16.1, and 3.16.2. People who were early adopters last week of these updates found themselves really struggling to maintain any semblance of sanity when their website(s) broke to what seemed to be beyond repair. There were reports of everything from a 500 server error to broken menus and spacing issues (padding) around images and elements within the web pages affected.
Quick to respond, the good folks behind Elementor put together a page with known bug and user experience issues. The primary recommendation for most of the issues found there were to roll back to a previous version of Elementor or to restore your site to a previous backup. Of course, the “general recommendations” are common sense: use a staging environment to test new releases and always back up your site before updating or rolling back. These should be web dev 101 for most people out there, but for those who are less experienced with this type of tragedy, knowledge sometimes comes as the high price of experience.
So if you’re in a pickle with your Elementor site (or worse yet, a client’s site!), we have one other recommendation for you to try. Many users are proclaiming that the third patch, Elementor 3.16.3, has solved their problems. So before you pull out all of your hair trying to fix things yourself, make a backup and then upgrade to the latest patch.
While Elementor is not my personal choice when it comes to WordPress site-building tools, it’s one I work with on behalf of clients. This means staying aware of current issues and solutions within the community. I hope that this knowledge will help you moving forward, both with this particular update of Elementor and with your web dev experiences in the future.
-Mike